by Roy Porter
Evangelicalism too repudiated the enlightened. The well-connected Bristol schoolmistress and playwright Hannah More rose to prominence in the 1780s as a religious and political conservative – she was to name her pet cats ‘Passive Obedience’ and ‘Non-Resistance’.130 Her Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society (1788) and An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (1791) castigated Addisonian politeness: ‘Under the beautiful mask of an enlightened philosophy, all religious restraints are set at nought.’ ‘Without holiness,’ she held, ‘no man shall see the Lord.’131 From early days she assumed a very English stance against the Revolution, telling Horace Walpole in November 1789, ‘I can figure to myself no greater mischiefs than despotism and popery, except anarchy and atheism’, and later exclaiming: ‘From liberty, equality and the rights of man, good Lord deliver us.’132
The people were being poisoned by print. ‘Novels,’ Miss More, lamented, ‘are now become mischievous’, for ‘they are… at once employed to diffuse destructive politics, deplorable profligacy, and impudent infidelity’. While the plebs pored over Paine, the heroines of trashy novels dieted exclusively on tea, ‘novels and metaphysicks’.133 Whatever next? When The Rights of Man was promptly followed by Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she exploded: ‘the next influx of that irradiation, which our enlightenment is pouring in upon us, will illuminate the world with grave descants on the rights of youth – the rights of children – the rights of babies!’ (She guessed right: in 1797 Thomas Spence produced his Rights of Infants.) 134
Still, recognizing that print had to be fought with print, in 1795 More devised her ‘Cheap Repository Tracts’; priced at around a penny each, their sales were amazing – in the first six weeks, 300,000 copies of the various tracts were sold wholesale, and by March 1796, the total had reached 2,000,000 copies.135 In order ‘to counteract the pernicious doctrines, which, owing to the French Revolution, were then becoming seriously alarming’, she had set the ball rolling back in 1793 with Village Politics – it has been dubbed ‘Burke for Beginners’ – addressing it to ‘all the Mechanics, Journeymen, and Labourers in Great Britain’. Hammering home the message of obedience to superiors, another of her books, The Riot; or, Half a Loaf is Better than No Bread (1795), takes the form of a dialogue between Jack Anvil, an honest blacksmith, and Tom Hod, a mason, who has been seduced by the works of his namesake, Tom Paine, and who wants ‘a new constitution, liberty and equality’. ‘What book art reading?’ Jack asks Tom, ‘Why dost look so like a hang dog?’
TOM: (looking on his book.) Cause enough. Why I find here that I'm very unhappy, and very miserable; which I should never have known if I had not had the good luck to meet with this book. O 'tis a precious book!
JACK: A good sign tho’; that you can't find out you're unhappy without looking into a book for it. What is the matter?
TOM: Matter? Why I want liberty.
JACK: Liberty! What has one fetched a warrant for thee? Come man, cheer up, I'll be bound for thee. – Thou art an honest fellow in the main, tho' thou dost tipple and prate a little too much at the Rose and Crown.
TOM: No, no, I want a new constitution.
JACK: Indeed! Why I thought thou hadst been a desperate healthy fellow. Send for the doctor then.
TOM: I'm not sick; I want Liberty and Equality, and the Rights of Man.
JACK: O now I understand thee. What thou art a leveller and a republican I warrant…
TOM: I'm a friend to the people. I want a reform… I want freedom and happiness, the same as they have got in France.
Patient Jack then has to explain to surly Tom that ‘when this levelling comes about, there will be no infirmaries, no hospitals, no charity- schools, no Sunday-schools… For who is to pay for them? Equality can't afford it’,136 before going on to cite St Paul on obeying the powers that be, and to reassure his mate that England has the best king, laws and liberty in the world. All ends happily with Tom agreeing to ‘mind his own business’, and both singing ‘The Roast Beef of England’.137 Along similar lines, Miss More's History of Mr Fantom the New-fashioned Philosopher and his Man William (179?) features a rash footman character called William Wilson, who has been debauched by radical philosophy and ends up being hanged: ‘New-Fashioned Philosopher’ says it all.138
Another who assailed enlightenment from the Evangelical corner was William Wilberforce.139 ‘Rational religion’ was, he maintained, mere ‘nominal Christianity’, rational Christians were well-nigh heathens and faith had to be ‘vital’, a religion of the True Cross.140 Back in 1785 Wilberforce, then a young MP for Hull, recorded his ‘despair of the republic’, precipitated by ‘the universal corruption and profligacy of the times’. Convinced it was a matter of ‘reform or ruin’, he unfolded his mission: ‘God Almighty has set before me two great objects,’ he solemnly recorded in his diary on 28 October 1787, ‘the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.’ His Evangelicalism was grounded on human depravity – man ‘is an apostate creature, fallen from his high original, degraded in his nature’ – and Christ crucified.141 It had become the ‘commonly received opinion’, asserted his A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity (1797) – to become the Evangelicals’ handbook – ‘that provided a man admit in general terms the truth of Christianity… we have no great reason to be dissatisfied with him’.142 Countering not just Latitudinarianism at large but specifically Paley's utilitarianism (‘it is a happy world after all’),143 Wilberforce reasserted a more sombre divinity, stressing man's probationary state, moral trial and redemption:
Christianity appears to me to consider the world as in a state of alienation from God… It ought to be the grand object of every moral writer… to produce in us that true and just sense of the intensity of the malignity of sin… Now, here, Dr Paley appears to me to fail.144
Certain of sinfulness, Wilberforce made the Atonement once more central to Christianity. The political consequences must be heeded: it was ‘to the decline of religion and morality’, he wrote, ‘that our national difficulties must both directly and indirectly be chiefly ascribed’.145
The most striking instance of the retreat into reaction is Thomas Robert Malthus. His father, Daniel, a personal friend of Rousseau, had been a torchbearer of enlightenment and had had his Bob educated by the most advanced teachers, notably Gilbert Wakefield of the Warrington Academy and William Frend, who tutored him from 1784 at Jesus College, Cambridge (from which he was later expelled for his Jacobinism). Schooled in Locke and Hartley, the son had been groomed to become a philosophical radical – before what might now be called his Oedipal revolt.146
The champagne fizz of revolution had naturally created great expectations, but were they rationally justified? asked Malthus in his Essay on the Principles of Population (1798). Radicals promised perfectibility, yet was mankind truly about to realize such Promethean dreams?147 Unlike Burke and Wilberforce, Malthus never denied the attraction of the ‘new dawn’, but his mood was wary. The programme of boundless progress was intrinsically self-defeating – knowledge would produce growth, growth would increase wealth, wealth would then fuel a population explosion – and that demanded attention to home truths:
population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence; but no writer… has inquired particularly into the means by which this level is effected: and it is a view of these means, which forms, to his mind, the strongest obstacle in the way to any very great future improvement of society.148
Malthus had thus hit upon the visionaries’ blind spot. For mercantilists and utilitarians, the more people the better – underpopulated kingdoms lacked labourers, soldiers and taxpayers. But, countered Malthus, the implications of such an increase had never been thought through by prophets of progress like Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet, author of the Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Progrès d
e l'Esprit Humain (1795). Fantasy had outrun thought: ‘I have certainly no right to say that they purposely shut their eyes,’ ironized the Anglican clergyman, yet ‘we are all of us too prone to err’.149
Countering the daydreamers, Malthus posed as the sober realist, scorning rhetoric and ‘mere conjectures’ in favour of facts.150 He alone had adopted the scientific approach to those questions of production and reproduction ‘explained in part by Hume, and more at large by Dr Adam Smith’.151 The issue lay in the discrepancies between great expectations and demographic reality. ‘Were the rising generation free from the “killing frost” of misery’, population ‘must rapidly increase’, for affluence would induce earlier marriage.152 Condorcet had glimpsed this overpopulation abyss, but had shrunk from its implications.153 He was to be honoured for recognizing that rising population was an obstacle rather than an opportunity, but faulted for then ducking the issue.154
Where Condorcet was complacent, Malthus was all concern:155 surging population was bound to stymie improvement. Radical plans were ravishing – Godwin's philosophy was ‘by far the most beautiful and engaging of any that has yet appeared’156 – but utopian bubbles were pricked by natural facts. Zealots ascribed all evils to the ancien régime; abolish the old order and, hey presto, everything was possible. But ‘the great error under which Mr Godwin labours throughout his whole work, is, the attributing almost all the vices and misery that are seen in civil society to human institutions’.157 The real obstacle was not the vices of the politicians but the nature of things.
How then did Nature balance production and reproduction? ‘I think,’ Malthus proposed, ‘I may fairly make two postulata’, namely that ‘food is necessary to the existence of man’ and that ‘the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state’ (‘These two laws… appear to have been fixed laws of our nature’).158 Population would thus inevitably tend to outrun resources and precipitate crisis: famine, epidemics and war. That was the great problem the radicals had never faced – they had merely come up with frivolous suggestions, notably Godwin's silly surmise ‘that the passion between the sexes may in time be extinguished’.159 Nature herself, in other words, foiled dreams of social equality.160 Grant these iron laws, and gloom was the only realism: ‘that the superior power of population cannot be checked, without producing misery or vice… bear too convincing a testimony’.161
Malthus thus spelt out a dismal future, with Nature ever poised to avenge herself against hubristic man. Subsequent editions of the Essay did at least suggest that catastrophe could be avoided – through ‘moral restraint’. Those unable to support families should abstain from marriage or, within marriage, desist from sex. (Parson Malthus abhorred contraception, for that sanctioned vice.)
Malthus was to be rebutted by many opponents, from all moral and political quarters; and in many ways the Malthusian controversy was the crux of the Enlightenment: Are man and Nature good? Thundering on through the nineteenth century, it mainly lies well beyond the scope of this book; however, it would be worthwhile to look briefly at two doctors who early refuted him, since both did so on the basis of enlightened reasoning.
In 1805 the Dissenting physician Charles Hall brought out The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States, which later acquired an anti-Malthusian ‘Appendix’.162 Like the parson, the doctor too was haunted by the spectre of poverty; Hall, however, insisted that the root of the problem lay in the iniquitous political system. Society had split into two nations, rich and poor – ‘the deaths of the poor are to those of the rich as two to one’. The occupations of the latter were harmful to their health; their moral education was neglected, their minds uncultivated, their lot insupportable. All this was due to an exploitative economic order.163 Malthus, Hall noted, ‘does not consider civilization as chargeable with any thing on this account, because, as he says, the same want and misery must necessarily happen in every system’, but that was false! Politics played the major part; rulers created the problem and then blamed Nature. Seeking a solution, Hall, like Spence and others, looked to land redistribution.
A second critic was the Dissenter Thomas Jarrold.164 Born in 1770, he was educated in medicine at Edinburgh University, going on to practise in Manchester, where he mixed with the manufacturing community, writing Anthropologia, or Dissertations on the Form and Colour in Man (1808) and other works on education, character and poverty.165 In Dissertations on Man, Philosophical, Physiological and Political; In answer to Mr Malthus's ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’ (1806), Jarrold contended that misery was not man's natural lot: ‘there is no physical cause of war, none of famine, none of pestilence’. Calamity ‘arises out of some act of human folly, or is the consequence of ignorance’.166 Since man was thus the agent of his own destruction, the prevalence of misery did not prove its necessity.167 The spectre of overpopulation was in any case unfounded. Increase was checked by many forces. Savage tribes were too warlike to expand, while in civilized societies various groups – prostitutes and professors, for instance – produced few offspring. Because ‘man is not a mere animal’, fertility was not a biological constant but a social variable.168
Hall and Jarrold equally refuted Malthus, but from diametrically opposite positions. For Hall, hunger and poverty were the progeny not of Nature but of capitalism; for Jarrold, much as for Erasmus Darwin, modern capitalist society offered the escape from those Malthusian dilemmas. Hall believed, like Godwin, that political action would eradicate poverty; Jarrold, that any overpopulation threat would wither away with growing prosperity. Both accused Malthus of a fatalism that followed from fathering on Nature arrangements which were essentially manmade, historical and political. Against Malthus's degrading vision – man as a slave to sexual appetites – both Hall and Jarrold defended divine design and human dignity. And both looked forward to better things – ‘the period is hastening when the condition of mankind will be far better than it now is,’ Jarrold concluded; ‘already I fancy I have seen the first dawning of this wished-for morning’.169 Both thus boldly reaffirmed enlightened optimism.
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Overall, however, the war years which culminated in the battle of Waterloo in 1815 were black times for the enlightened, who found themselves at odds with the political nation and the government, and involved in rearguard actions to defend the century's gains, notably freedom of speech and assembly and the other basic liberties won after 1688. Not only were they opposed by new ideologies of reaction, but erstwhile allies were jumping ship.
Some remained steadfast, however, like young Byron, whose lordly satire expressed a staunchly enlightened hostility to turncoat Romantics, Evangelicals and Tories.170 Another was William Hazlitt, who at the age of twenty had been mesmerized by the radical Coleridge. The son of a Unitarian minister, while still a child Hazlitt had read the Tatler, Tom Jones and all the other modern classics (‘buried treasure’) in his father's study, and thus bore impeccably enlightened credentials. Failing as an artist, he was to scrape a living as a prolific and pungent lecturer, journalist and essay-writer. Turbulent, inveterate and finally embittered, Hazlitt had a sense of being a loner (‘born under Saturn’) which owed much to his Nonconformist origins. Reflecting on the dissidence of Dissent, he remarked, ‘it was my misfortune (perhaps) to be bred among Dissenters… [he was educated at the Hackney Academy] who look with too jaundiced an eye at others, and set too high a value on their own peculiar pretensions. From being proscribed themselves, they learn to proscribe others.171
Hazlitt had hailed the French Revolution: ‘a new world,’ he wrote, ‘was opening to the astonished sight… Nothing was too mighty for this new-begotten hope; and the path that led to human happiness seemed as plain as the pictures in the Pilgrim's Progress leading to Paradise.’172 And, proscribed and proscribing, he remained an unwavering Jacobin:173 ‘The love of liberty consists in the hatred of tyrants.’174 A prose Byron, Hazlitt characterized his times as the age of betrayal: England had betrayed itself,
and France the Revolution; the Lake Poets betrayed their Jacobinism; the English politicians betrayed the constitution and the spirit of liberty; Burke betrayed his liberal principles, Bentham betrayed humanity and Malthus and Godwin betrayed experience. The depths of Hazlitt's disillusionment followed from a sense of enlightened hopes dashed. ‘I am no politician,’ he insisted in 1819 in his Political Essays:
and still less can I be said to be a partyman: but I have a hatred of tyranny, and a contempt for its tools… I deny that liberty and slavery are convertible terms, that right and wrong, truth and falsehood, plenty and famine, the comforts or wretchedness of a people, are matters of perfect indifference. That is all I know of the matter; but on these points I am likely to remain incorrigible.175
The reign of George III thus drew to a close with a mad monarch, with enlightened men like Hazlitt mourning the triumph of unreason, and with Swift's ghost cackling in the background.176
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LASTING LIGHT?
Books have always a secret influence on the understanding.
SAMUEL JOHNSON1
He that effects, by his writings or by his actions, a permanent change in the minds of men, deserves to be considered of no less importance in the history of the human species, than a statesman or conqueror who produces a revolution in a kingdom.
THOMAS DAY2
The eighteenth century… has been, of all that are past, the most honourable to human nature. Knowledge and virtue were increased and diffused; arts, sciences, useful to men, ameliorating their condition, were improved more than in any former equal period.